I’d like to highlight two items which Surrey Heath Borough Council has done well – recycling collections and publishing data on Council spending. In doing so, I do hope I don’t catch of pile of negative stuff by way of balance.
I’m sure you’ll have read, and with some surprise if you’re a Surrey Heath resident, that some council have household rubbish uncollected for over four weeks. Where we live in Lightwater we were lucky that the collection cycle and the icy and snowy weather didn’t combine to halt any of our collections. For which a huge vote of thanks to the recycling team.
It wasn’t a perfect story in Surrey Heath, there have been complaints about missed collections. But, overall the Council and the recycling team worked well. So, good marks for our Council, but bad marks to those defeatist Councils who’ve let the situation get out of hand. Have you received a new calendar of recycling collections for 2011/12? because we haven’t. The previous one ran out at the end of November 2009. We and some of our neighbours were almost caught out over Christmas because we’d wrongly assumed that our collection day was moved by a day. I must check if there is a new calendar.
I wonder if these are the same Councils failing with rubbish collections are the same ones who’ve yet to publish details of all their sending over £500. Surrey Heath is among the 144 councils that have published their spending. You can download Surrey Heath’s spending data to carry out your own analysis of where the money is spent. So good marks again for Surrey Heath. Why over half of all Councils find it so difficult to comply with Eric Pickles request is baffling.
I note that the data is for the financial year ending March 2010. What I’d like to see is some of the data published in the current financial year. I wouldn’t mind it being for the previous quarter
That’s the good news. But we must improve – recycling calendar, and publishing in-year spending – on which I’ll report back.
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